AMHERST — The University of Massachusetts at Amherst is struggling to draw students from its own state.

The number of undergraduates from Massachusetts at the University of Connecticut has risen 70 percent in the past decade while the number of Connecticut students enrolled at UMass Amherst dropped by 5.5 percent.

Enrollment by Massachusetts students jumped 60 percent at the University of New Hampshire and 50 percent at the University of Vermont.

For Massachusetts families choosing colleges, UMass Amherst, the state's flagship state campus, is not good enough.

Despite improvement efforts that date back generations, UMass Amherst is among the nation's second-tier state schools, hurt by years of budget cuts. The average SAT scores of incoming students, freshman retention rates and graduation rates lag those of its peers.